Victims and whistleblowers central to a major human rights scandal at the U.S. Justice Department will be among the speakers at the 10th Annual Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival this week in Washington, DC.
A panel on July 26 organized by the Justice Integrity Project is scheduled to include former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, right, and
HealthSouth founder and former CEO Richard Scrushy, each of whom served more than six years in prison on what many observers have long regarded as trumped-up corruption charges.
The Justice Department, then controlled by political enemies of Siegelman, manufactured the charges more than 15 years ago in cooperation with Alabama Republicans. The purpose? To end Siegelman’s political career in disgrace and imprisonment -- and also oust Scrushy from leadership of the multi-billion-dollar company he had founded and to profit from his ouster, critics say.
Participating also on the panel “Righting the Wrongs of a ‘Shadow Government’” in the week-long conference will be Tami Todd, the former top Justice Department paralegal for the prosecution. She was fired after raising concerns internally with
the Justice Department about the gross irregularities that she had witnessed implicating high-level lawyers leading the prosecution.
Another panelist is Thomas T. Gallion, III, right, a prominent attorney for many years in Alabama. He has described the prosecution as part of a scandalous hidden history of corrupt prosecutions extending back decades that he believes occur without accountability from ostensibly reputable employees of the Justice Department and their allies.
The Tuesday session is at 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the second day of the conference, and is available for free remote viewing for registrants visiting this site.
The Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival
This week's event features panels, films, awards and co-located events by other whistleblower groups. The Summit event ends on July 30 with a Tribute to Dick Gregory providing comedy, plus an awards presentation that features celebrity host Marsha Warfield at the Busboys & Poets Restaurant in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in the nation’s capital.
The Summit and Film Festival has been managed for years by Michael McCray and Marcel Reid, two former national board members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), who joined the whistleblowing community by protesting corruption within
ACORN, as recounted in the McCray's memoir, Race, Power & Politics (2009), right, written with Reid.
The event is normally based primarily on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. But it relies heavily this year on Zoom and other remote viewing because of the region’s recent upsurge of coronavirus cases. The program began on Monday, July 25, with a series of panel discussions underscoring the importance of whistleblowing in fostering a healthy civic life in the United States.
Regarding the Justice Integrity Project panel on July 26, it will be moderated by this editor, Andrew Kreig, who has written extensively about the Alabama scandals, including a comprehensive investigative story front-paged for days by the Huffington Post in 2009:
Huffington Post, Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge’s ‘Grudge’, Evidence Shows….$300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge’s Private Company. The Alabama federal judge who presided over the 2006 corruption trial of the state's former governor holds a grudge against the defendant for helping to expose the judge's own alleged corruption six years ago.
Former Gov. Don Siegelman therefore deserves a new trial with an unbiased judge ─ not one whose privately owned company, Doss Aviation, has been enriched by the Bush administration's award of $300 million in contracts since 2006, making the judge millions in non-judicial income.
Panelists will describe their experiences and share their thoughts on how best to reform the justice system, a continuing issue involving many controversial situations nationally these days involving the Justice Department, whose personnel are usually praised instinctively by mainstream journalists whose work encourages them to rely on authorities for information.
Alabama Injustice, With National Implications
As for specifics of the 2006 convictions of the Democrat Siegelman and the Republican Scrushy in Alabama’s state capital of Montgomery on highly dubious corruption charges:
The irregularities in the case before Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller of the Alabama Middle District prompted massive, unsuccessful and rare -- if not unprecedented -- protests by former prosecutors, law professors and grassroots protesters, with a few journalists breaking the tradition of accepting prosecution allegations with scant criticism.
Some 113 former state attorneys general, the chief law enforcers from more than forty states, wrote an unsuccessful friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing unsuccessfully that no crime had been committed when Scrushy’s company contributed to a non-profit that Siegelman had founded to advocate for better funding for Alabama’s schools. Similarly, more than 40 law professors filed similar arguments in seeking Supreme Court review of the convictions by a jury that rejected the most serious charges against the defendants but compromised to find some guilty verdicts under pressure from the presiding judge.
Our Justice Integrity Project, which published dozens of investigative articles about irregularities in the case, has estimated that well over 200,000 complaints via letters, phone calls and emails from the public about the verdict were received by the Justice Department and White House as part of what became a human rights scandal of global notoriety.
Among those journalists first raising serious questions about the prosecution were investigative reports in 2007 by Harper’s legal columnist Scott Horton, independent bloggers Roger Shuler, Wayne Madsen and Glynn Wilson, and investigative commentary by a few journalists at the New York Times, Time Magazine, CBS News and NBC News.
CBS “60 Minutes,” for example, broadcast a 2008 investigative report led by correspondent Scott Pelley featuring Republican attorneys, including then-McCain for President co-chair Grant Woods, right, a former Arizona attorney general. Woods argued that the prosecution by fellow Republicans in the Bush Administration and Alabama state government was
based on politics, not a sound reading of relevant law.
The CBS report also quoted Alabama attorney Dana Jill Simpson, who stated that she had been a Republican operative for years and knew that fellow Republicans, including then Senior Bush White House Advisor Karl Rove, had targeted Siegelman to prevent him from winning re-election in 2006 after he was narrowly defeated in 2002 following his 1999-2003 term.
As one conflict that Todd (then using the last name Grimes) had separately highlighted, Middle District U.S. Attorney Leura Canary was married to longtime Rove ally William Canary, the campaign manager for Siegelman’s Republican
gubernatorial opponent in 2006, Gov. Bob Riley, left.
As part of the congressional inquiries into the so-called "U.S. Attorney Firing Scandal" of 2006 whereby the Bush administration fired presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys unwilling to bring dubious cases against Democrats, Simpson gave testimony before House Judiciary Committee staff in 2007. She stated that the Siegelman/Scrushy presiding judge, Fuller, a Republican, “hated” Siegelman because of previous political controversies and that Rove led an effort to use the Justice Department to imprison Siegelman to help Republicans win elections in Alabama, with parallel efforts elsewhere.
The courtroom irregularities and the pattern of nationwide abuses attracted also brave but seemingly fruitless interventions by numerous whistleblowers trying to reverse the apparent frame-up of two of Alabama’s most prominent citizens and the destruction of their life’s work, Siegelman and Scrushy.
The central allegation by prosecutors to win their corruption convictions was that Siegelman reappointed Scrushy, a Republican shown at left early in his career, to an Alabama state health board. This was in the same general time frame that Scrushy’s corporate entities made substantial donations to help retire the debt for a Siegelman-led non-profit that had advocated in a 1998 referendum for more state funding for public schools via creation of a state lottery that might undercut income for private casinos that opposed the lottery.
Siegelman and Scrushy have both denied that there was any “quid pro quo” between the donation and reappointment, with Scrushy saying he did not even want to be on the regulatory board since he was a CEO running a multi-billion-dollar company. Scrushy has said also that he routinely authorized major charitable and political donations for Alabama causes as part of normal operations for a large company, with generous contributions to Republican governors before Siegelman's term.
But prosecutors presented at trial a witness, former Siegelman aide, Nick Bailey, who was facing serious prison time for separate offenses, who
suggested a relationship between the donations and the reappointment.
Since then experts have repeatedly challenged Bailey’s credibility and focused on many legal irregularities. These include up to 70 secret government pre-trial interrogations of Bailey at an Air Force base, in effect coaching sessions, led by a prosecutor who was a colonel in the Air Force reserves and also without required disclosure to defense counsel of the prosecutors' actions. Such disclosures to the defense to enable it to prepare are ordinarily required under Supreme Court precedent.
Among post-conviction developments: Scrushy was stripped of his leadership of HealthSouth and incurred a $500 million civil fraud judgment while he was imprisoned in the Siegelman scase and unable to defend himself adequately in court. He later published a powerful memoir, It Should Not Happen in America: From Selma to Wall Street, a Journey of Fire and Faith.
So did Siegelman in his Stealing Our Democracy: How the Political Assassination of a Governor Threatens Our Nation, shown at left.
Panelists will describe their experiences and share their thoughts on how best to reform the system.
Separately, Gallion, published a memoir Shadow Government: Southern Style – A Saga of Political Corruption rom DC to Dixie, describing the years of injustice he has witnessed as a prominent Alabama attorney active in the Republican Party and based in the state capitol.
He decries the injustice of the Siegelman and Scrushy prosecutions, as well as numerous other cases dating back seven decades to a time when his late father was state attorney general.
His treatment blows the whistle on several of his well-connected Republican friends, including the trial judge in the case.
Gallion also links the prosecution to a desire by Alabama Republicans to profit from legalized gambling interests while maintaining a veneer of anti-gambling moralisms.
Gallion repeatedly refers to what he calls "The Cabal" running Alabama, which he describes as primarily Republicans but with important hidden relationships with powerful Democrats that he names. The identities are beyond the scope of this article but are readily found via his public comments as a whistleblower drawing on both research and personal observation.
In 2009, this editor profiled Todd and her heroic whistleblowing for a "Sue," nationwide magazine for paralegals in an article entitled, From Justice Dream Job to Nightmare…Why This Whistleblower Was Dissed & Dismissed. The magazine editor, Chere Estrin, told me it was the most important article they had ever published because it illustrated the pitfalls that paralegals can encounter even when they have every reason to think they are on the side of justice in a case.
Todd, who formerly used the last name "Grimes," has since become an attorney and is working on a memoir of her own that will address the lessons to be learned from the injustices she witnessed and the whistleblowing she undertook at the cost of her job at the Justice Department. She says she draws inspiration from, among other places, her small town upbringing, training in the law and the powerful best-seller Just Mercy (2014), authored by Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.
Accountability?
Authorities from both major parties have always resisted detailed answers to questions about the irregularities in the case aside from legal filings that for the most part sidestepped issues, with affirmation by pro-prosecution judges who failed to deal in any detail with allegations of mind-boggling prosecution irregularities.
Eric Holder, left, the attorney general in the Democratic administration of President Obama, told this editor in an improptu interview after a speech that he was a unfamiliar with the Siegelman case, a highly dubious assertion.
Among the reasons: Holder's wife is an Alabama native, Holder personally fired Todd in 2009, and his Justice Department ardently and successfully fought the Siegelman and Scrushy petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court for review that included the unprecedented friend-of-court arguments by the 113 former state attorneys general arguing that Siegelman and Scrushy had not committed any crime because of the donations to the non-profit Alabama Education Foundation.
Federal and state officials did pressure Fuller publicly and privately to resign from his lifetime appointment to the federal bench in 2015 after he was arrested the previous year for beating his wife, his former court clerk in the Siegelman-Scrushy case, in an Atlanta hotel room.
But that matter was separate from the many other scandals regarding the Siegelman/Scrushy cases and similar abuses that have remained unresolved and in many ways uninvestigated in any thorough manner.